Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/298

Rh thing for him to have said, but she answered quite frankly that she was glad to be out again. She asked him if he had seen all the pictures, and when he said he had not, she took him up to three or four that she liked best. While she was describing one of them, she suddenly broke off with—

"Oh, it was so lovely of you to have thought of sending that cow for my baby! But—is n't it sad!—the doctor won't let him have the milk from it. The milk of a Jersey is n't good for babies; they must have only the common cow."

"I never knew that before," said Floyd.

"I didn't either," she admitted. "It's astonishing how ignorant a person can be about babies and yet bring them into the world. I'm not going to send your cow back to you, Floyd; I'm going to keep it till the little Floyd gets old enough to appreciate it."

"Thank you," Floyd said. "Meanwhile it will give me pleasure to send round a most ordinary cow."

"Oh no, you really must n't. Besides, we have no place for it. But it's good of you, Floyd, to think of it; thank you."

She turned again to the picture and resumed her interpretation of it, but, as it seemed to Floyd, with a certain indifference—at least as contrasted with the frank enthusiasm of her digression. Floyd had a flash of insight; Stewart had lost her. Not absolutely, to be sure; but the place he had held since the beginning of his married life was no longer his; there was something henceforth more vital to her than his work and his play; perhaps in the unselfishness of fatherhood he would resign himself to this withdrawal of interest and even rejoice in it. However this might be, the important fact which Floyd clearly recognized was that hereafter she must be more remote from him, as well as from her husband. She stood before him as much a girl as ever, in appearance,—as slender, as laughing, as young; yet her girlhood now lay